'Why, beg her to go across and take a general view of the patient. She is an intelligent woman - they exist, whatever you may say - she had the good word of my old friend Dr. Teevan: she has had a world of experience, and she will tell my poor battered stupefied mind what to expect.'
She told him, as she put on his clean shirt and tidied his hair, that Saint Luke and all his fellow-apostles could not save the arm now, nor the whole college of surgeons of Dublin; but she thought that his honour, if she might say so, could possibly save the poor creature's life by taking it off at the shoulder, still quite a clean joint: and she had told the whalers what to do, what to prepare; and she had put up the usual implements.
The time to cross two decks and to descend into the well-lit cabin where the patient lay fighting his pain, his grief and his dread, was enough to restore the medical Stephen to life; and after a cursory examination that wholly confirmed what Poll had said, he carried out a rapid, unusually satisfactory amputation with excellent flaps of healthy skin, which he had scarcely dared hope for, and he murmured into the patient's ear, 'There: it is over. You will do remarkably well, if you lie quite still and drink no spirits at all for a week.'
'Is it over, sir?' asked the patient. 'I did not know. God bless you.'
On deck he said to the master of the ship, 'You will stay here, beside the ship, if you please. I am reasonably sanguine about your man - your brother, I believe? - and I should like to dress his shoulder tomorrow and show the most intelligent of your shipmates how to carry on until he is quite well.'
'I have always liked whalers,' said Jack, still waving though they were half a mile apart on a blessed calm forenoon with a fine breeze for reaching. 'They have to be right seamen to survive at all. People call them rough and their ships all a-hoo, and to be sure they kick up Bob's-a-dying on shore: but then they live rough, most uncommon rough. Yet for open-handed, I do not know their equal, though in general sailors are not often called skin-flints. Carling there, Joseph Carling, would have emptied his hold if I had let him: but I would not accept more than a couple of casks of biscuit, once I had heard that there was a small sheltered port or rather anchorage within reach, a little place called Pillon where most of the whalers down here go for their stores. The place is kept by a Hull man married to an Indian woman and he knows just what they need.' A pause, and Jack went on, gazing after the whaler, now hull-down, 'It is pleasant to see how sailors recognise one another all over the world: I am sorry you were too busy aboard Ringle and with your patients here to dine with Carling and me. You would have heard about some fellow-members of the Royal. Do you remember Dobson, Austin Dobson?'
'The entomologist?'
'Just so.'
'Of course I do. The Proceedings would not be what they are without him. There are no less than three beetles named after Austin Dobson: in fact there may by now even be a fourth.'
'Have you heard about his inheritance?'
'Come, my dear, pray do not let us tease one another with question and answer. I find that I am somewhat fractious today - I have been made to work far too hard: I am nourished on most indifferently preserved penguins and seals. And I desire you to give me a plain straightforward sea-manlike account of our colleague.'
'Very well. Let us go below and sit in comfort. There: put up your feet and calm your spirit. Austin Dobson, now, had a remote cousin whom he did not know - had barely met - who lived in gloomy splendour somewhere far in the north, where coal is mined and shipped from Newcastle.
Now this cousin died, and Dobson inherited some ludicrous sum: millions - I do not know how many, but millions. And he instantly set about doing what he had always longed to do. He bought the Lisbon packet, a very stout serviceable craft designed to make rapid passages across the Bay of Biscay, and with an adequate crew and five or six friends, all Fellows of the Royal Society, botanists or entomologists and one authority on marine life - all men of wide interests - he set off by way of the Cape to India, Ceylon, the Spice Islands and so across the Pacific. They looked into Juan Fernandez and now they are working up the Chilean and Peruvian coasts as far as the Panama Isthmus, where two mean to cross and take ship the other side, carrying the seeds and more delicate specimens - they have university commitments - while Dobson and his remaining friends carry on to Nootka Sound, returning by way of Kamschatka, where two of them mean to study the Economical Rat of those parts.'
'What a noble ambition,' cried Stephen, clasping his hands. 'What fortitude, too: for however comfortable the packet - and those I have known have all been neat, padded and as it were well-sprung - these men have already traversed some waters that call for a certain resolution, continually renewed between Cancer and Capricorn. And even in a very well-found packet there is sure to be a certain monotony of diet... no, no, it is a noble way of enjoying an inheritance. I honour him.'
Jack said, 'I am sorry you were not there: you would certainly have known most of them - you go to the Royal much more often than I do, and to the dinners. My friends there, the people whose papers I read with most attention, are the astronomers and mathematicians. These men here, of course, were primarily naturalists of one kind or another, and when the two craft put into San Patricio together for stores they asked the whalers all sorts of things about whales - the various kinds, depth of blubber, pregnancy in whales, where found, numbers in schools - accompanying young? Ambergris, where located?'
They both laughed: Stephen had once been cast ashore on a coral island, where his only companion, apart from a few crabs, was a piece of ambergris.
'Why do we laugh? There was nothing droll about your situation or our anxiety,' said Jack.
'Perhaps because you found me, so it all ended happily. But to be sure, laughter is sometimes wonderfully obscure: whenever my mind moves to that piece of ambergris I feel the birth of a smile: I do hope we meet these men. Theirs is a very respectable curiosity and I for one long to know the answer to some of their questions.'
Jack was called away at this point - something whirling about among the sails, in all probability - and Stephen sank into a by no means agreeable fit of musing. He might not possess the millions attributed to Dobson - and indeed, very large sums were required for that kind of exercise - but he was what most people would call rich or at least quite rich; and yet he had done no more than consider a journey into the Atacama desert to examine the effects of extreme aridity, and another to study the life of the Caucasian snow-cock: and these mere considerations had led to nothing concrete. He had contributed nothing to the sum of knowledge. Some part of his mind at once offered a flood of denials, excuses, attenuating circumstances, assertions of his distinguished merit, his unbroken record of observing Lent as strictly as any man not even in minor orders; but he remained low- spirited, and he was glad to see Jack reappear with the news that 'the damned fore... had carried away, but all was fast and a-tanto now.' The words that followed fore sounded very like a piece of obscenity far, far grosser than anything that Jack was ever likely to say and Stephen was still trying to recapture the sound and interpret it when he became aware that he was now being told about Daniel's and Hanson's zeal in plotting their course for the whaler's refuge of Pillon behind its protecting island. They had Joseph Carling's bearings, his outline of the island from south-west and due west, his directions for the entrance to the little bay, and an at least approximate table of the tides.
'With this sweet breeze we should be off the coast a little before high tide at nine,' said Jack. 'We shall lie
